This weeks Thrifty Gift Friday has us making a trip to the dollar store to make these great bottles of moisturizing Hand Cream. Winter skin leaves most of us feeling dry and what a simple yet wonderful gift of mixing together your own customized batches of hand cream, all with easy to find items from your dollar store.
There are a ton of recipes for making your own hand lotions or creams and they are all wonderful, but I just don't have time in my crazy life to be tracking down ingredients from different stores or sources, so I came up with my own. It will only take you like 5 minutes to make these gifts, yet they have that "Wow, you make your own lotion?, what a thoughtful gift!" reaction from the recipients.
Feel free to play around with the idea and customize the "recipe" to suit your own preferences.
Jan's Tip: I chose to use 2 (10 oz. each) Tubes of the Dermasil Lotion because I felt it was a better quality than the more generic 20 oz. bottles of lavender or aloe, or cocoa butter. Feel free to use any lotion you want to.
Moisturizing Hand Cream
Ingredients:
1 large (20 oz.) bottle of lotion (any kind)
1 (10 oz) bottle of the CREAMY baby oil
1 (4.5 oz.) CREAMY petroleum jelly
1 (4.5 oz) CREAMY Cocoa butter petroleum jelly (yep it's a Vaseline lotion infused with cocoa butter!)
Optional add-ins: or in place of any of the above ingredients: Vitamin E. oil, coconut oil (it has the consistency of shortening), aloe, jojoba oil, etc.
Jan's Tip: Other than the lotion, the other ingredients listed are all CREAMY versions: baby oil and the Petroleum (a.k.a.Vaseline) is the creamy version (so it looks and feels like a white lotion!) Make sure you get all the CREAMY versions!
If you are worried that the creamy baby oil might make the lotion too "greasy" I don't find the finished product to be sticky or greasy, it absorbs into your skin fairly quickly, but not instantly so if you are concerned you can leave it out.
Directions:
Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl and spoon into gift bottles. (Small canning jelly jars or baby food jars would be great for this. you'd get more than I did if you use these smaller jars.)
A word about adding fragrance: Many people like myself are sensitive to fragrances. They trigger migraines for me. If giving gifts I generally don't add fragrance oils, but if you do want one, go with a soft vanilla. Your instinct may be lavender, but that is a huge migraine trigger for many people, so just a suggestion to consider!
Label jars
Here's the cute free printables I used
My jars hold about 8 oz. each. They were from the dollar store. So lets add this up:
If you use your own jars you only paid $4.00 dollars total and got anywhere from 3 gifts to maybe 5 or 6 gifts depending on the size jars you use! so that's less than a dollar a gift, yet it is sooooo cute!
If you buy jars than it's just a little bit more, but still probably less than $2.00 a gift
I mean how else can you spend less than $5.00 on supplies and make a ton of cute gifts in 5 minutes flat! That's what I call, cute, thrifty and swifty!
WHAT WOULD YOU MIX IN TO YOUR CUSTOM LOTION?
